Squeak and Active Objects

Eric Merritt cyberlync at yahoo.com
Tue Mar 4 22:30:08 UTC 2003


Hello All,

 How good is the threading system within squeak? I
have quite a few little simulations written in Erlang
and I thought I would try moving a few to squeak. This
is for fun more then anything else. 

 I thought that the most interesting way to go about
this would be to wrap objects up into their own
threads, something like Mozart-Oz does with its active
objects
(http://www.mozart-oz.org/documentation/tutorial/node11.html#section.objectscc.active)

 <side-note> 
   I realize their is nothing to be gained performance
wise by the use of multiple threads. This is
especially true in squeak as it uses VM threads.
However, in this context I am using threads as another
abstraction, nothing more.
 </side-note>

 There will probably be a few problems, of course. I
am not sure how 'light' squeak threads are. In Erlang
processes cost almost nothing to spin off and the
system is designed completely around concurrency. I
don't expect Squeak to compete with Erlang or Mozart
in this area, but it would need to support a goodly
number of concurrent threads.
 
 I should probably just test this, but I though it
would be nice to get the communities input

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